from the nickel-and-dime dept

Konami's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a fantastic game. I'm about 70% through according to the game's completion status, and while in typical Hideo Kojima fashion the plot is an incoherent mess, the level of polish and detail in the game is unprecedented. But sometimes a great, well-reviewed $60 game just isn't good enough. What do you do when your game breaks all manner of sales figures and is universally acclaimed? Why, you suddenly decide to saddle it with a brave new form of annoying microtransaction, of course.

Konami's latest microtransaction for the game went live last week, and is essentially a protection racket for users who'd like to keep their character's home fort (aka "mother base") intact. Players can spend hours collecting resources in-game to build up their mother base with weaponry, staff, and other defenses. As you grow your micro mercenary empire you can also expand into what's called forward operating bases (FOBs), which other players can not only invade, but steal resources and staff from. Here's what it looks like in-game:

"Your FOBs are always at risk of coming under attack. Now, you can rest easy with FOB insurance (paid service). If you sign up for insurance, then during the insurance period you will be compensated for any materials and staff lost due to rival infiltrations...Staff/materials stolen by the rival will in fact remain on your base, and an identical amount of staff/materials will be handed over to the rival instead.

In other words, those who paid $60 for the game will have things stolen from them periodically, but those willing to pay more will avoid such a fate. Amusingly, just like real insurance, you have to keep consistently paying to remain covered, and there are a number of things the insurance won't cover:

"FOB insurance isn't a one-off payment either, with players required to renew the virtual insurance policy periodically in order to remain protected. Just like real-life, not everything will be covered by the policy either, including abducted staff being held in the Brig; wounded staff (although, staff lost due to death or extraction will be compensated); staff used in defence of the FOB; and nuclear weapons."

You pay for the insurance with MB coins, which can be bought with real cash payments ranging from $1 for 100 coins to $50 for 6000, or acquired (slowly) in-game for completing tasks. One-day of coverage will cost users 50 coins, three days costs 100, a week costs 200 and two weeks costs 300 coins. Now I personally don't give a damn as I tend to focus more on offline play to misanthropically avoid human beings, but for those who appreciate a little something called in-game balance, making the entire point of competing with other users irrelevant has justifiably raised more than a few hackles.

from the solid dept

Well, well. We had just been discussing Konami getting YouTube to take down a video it didn't like, one produced by YouTuber Super Bunnyhop, which discussed a supposed breakup between the gaming giant and famed game-producer Hideo Kojima. The excuse for the takedown was apparently something like half-a-minute's worth of game footage from the Metal Gear Solid franchise, a significant portion of which was simply one game's title screen. YouTube, with its content-makers friendly notice/takedown policy, complied with the takedown. Often times, that would be the end of the story. We'd all cry foul, complain that copyright sucks, and head on to the next story.

This time, however, is different. Super Bunnyhop challenged the takedown with a notice to Google and Google responded by both reinstating the video and warning Konami to stop screwing around. After reinstating the video, here is what YouTube sent to Konami.

It's a standard notice Google sends out when takedowns aren't on the level, but it's still nice to see. Not only does the letter let Konami know YouTube is concerned over the bullshit takedown, but it also helpfully gave the company a quick primer on fair use. There is some polite language requesting additional information should Konami still want to claim the video to be infringement, but any cursory glance ought to be enough to know that the whole thing falls under fair use. YouTube also sent Super Bunnyhop a notice that the video had been reinstated.

"This may be the first time YouTube has quickly stepped in and reviewed a bogus copyright claim for a gaming video,” [Super Bunnyhop] said to me over email. “If that’s the case, then my situation may be breaking new ground, and this could be good news for YouTubers everywhere.”

Yeah, there's actually no real new ground being broken here. YouTube sends these letters out all the time and it reinstates videos like this when the takedown is crap as well. That said, every fair use victory is a step in the right direction and it's worth reminding everyone out there that the takedown doesn't have to be the end of the story for non-infringing videos. Sometimes intellectual property is used for censorship and there is little anyone can do about it. But that's not always the case and it's important to fight it wherever possible.

from the well-that-didn't-work dept

I tend to be able to undestand when smaller companies, or perhaps younger companies, don't know and understand what the Streisand Effect is and how it works. You can write off this stuff sometimes to inexperience, even if you don't forgive the censorious actions themselves. But I think it's fair to say that Konami should know better than to think it could get away with disappearing a YouTube video it didn't like, yet that's exactly what Konami did.

Two weeks ago, George “Super Bunnyhop” Weidman published a YouTube video alleging he had information about the ongoing tension between Konami and Hideo Kojima. Now, it’s offline. (In case you missed the drama of the last few months, Kojima and Konami appear to be in the midst of a breakup, even as Kojima finishes work on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.)

Now, you can understand why Konami might not want a video about Metal Gear creator Kojima circulating just as the work on the latest iteration of the game series is due to be completed. After all, Kojima is well-known, very popular, and the news that there is some kind of rift between him and Konami might create doubt in customers' minds about just how much effort is going into this latest game. Add to that the notion that a public breakup with a popular game-designer can probably only hurt Konami's reputation and it's easy to get why the company would prefer all of this be buried.

And that's why taking down this video makes no sense. It not only gets a wider audience talking about the contents of the video, which have been put back up on another YouTube video, but it adds credibility to the claims made within it. After all, if this was all far-fetched speculative nonsense, Konami should have laughed the reports off, not used copyright to silence the video entirely. Use of game footage within the video is sparse at most, making all of this seem like a pure attempt at censorship using intellectual property, which, duh.

Based on Kotaku's reporting, it should be noted, this is almost certainly a manual takedown, as opposed to a Content ID grab.

There are two ways for a video to disappear from YouTube that doesn’t involve the creator deleting the video. One, there’s YouTube’s Content ID system, which scans videos for copyrighted material. Content ID, however, typically kicks in as soon as the video is uploaded, and wouldn’t normally bring a video down from the service two weeks later. It’s possible but unlikely, as all my interactions with Content ID have occurred very early in the process.

Two, a company purposely (and manually) issues a takedown notice, knowing YouTube will err on the side of rights holders, at least until the issue is resolved. During that time, the video is offline. Companies have used this tactic in the past to suppress videos they didn’t care for.

If the latter is the case with this takedown, it's quite a misunderstanding of the reaction to censorship of this kind in this day and age. Enjoy all the press that hated video is getting, Konami. You created it all, after all...

from the losing-your-head dept

Look, I don't even know where to begin with this, so let's just dive right in. A trailer for the upcoming release of the latest game in the Metal Gear Solid series came out a while back and, for reasons I can't even begin to explain, a whole load of folks out there decided that a doctor that appeared in the trailer looked an awful lot like a real-life Italian doctor. But not just any doctor. This doctor is apparently working on achieving the first ever successful human-head transplant with spinal reconnection.

For almost a week now, some parts of the gaming internet have been going nuts over the visual similarities between the doctor that features in the trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and the controversial real-live Dr Sergio Canavero, the neurosurgeon who recently found sudden fame when he claimed that he was ready and able to perform the first human head transplant in medical history. He’s even found a prospective patient, a Russian called Valery Spirodonov, who suffers from a terminal muscle-wasting disease.

The images of the character and Canavero, when placed side-by-side, are certainly striking.

Apparently there have been people calling up Doctor Canavero and questioning him about his relationship to the game, of which he claims to have none. Those callers have been spurred on by all kinds of conspiracy theories being drawn up to explain the similarities. TED Talks by the doctor deal with some of the issues and language supposedly appearing in the MGS game, MGS creator Hideo Kojima has talked about how the new game will deal with controversial issues (head-transplants would probably count), and some have even made claims that the doctor isn't a real doctor and this is all just a media stunt (it isn't, Dr. Canavero is a real, published doctor).

Kotaku's UK site got Canavero on the phone and he claimed to have nothing to do with the game or Kojima. As it turns out, Konami used an actor for the character model in question and it's the actor that happens to resemble Canavero. In other words, it's just a weird coincidence. Except Dr. Canavero doesn't think so.

I pointed out his resemblance to the actor from whom Konami actually did the scanning for the three-dimensional model, but he tells me that his lawyer has suggested something different that involves a conference held in Cyprus:

"One of the sponsors was coincidentally a game developer. Maybe some people there...I don't know...maybe they recorded the thing from certain angles, maybe the cameras were set up in the right spots... I do not know. It's just a hypothesis, but maybe it's not too far-fetched."

Cavanero goes on to point out that this isn't such a bad thing, as he's raising money for his HEAVEN project (you know, the whole taking one person's head and sticking it on another person's body thing) and this has brought some additional notoriety to him. That makes this next bit more perplexing:

“I went to the Polizia Postale [the authority in charge of this kind of thing here in Italy] and filed a complaint towards Mr.Kojima. There is also a Twitter account that is not mine, so I reported this to the Police too, they will now investigate both the matters. In the meantime my lawyer is sending a letter to the Japanese company [Konami] to ask for compensation [for using my image without permission].”

Except that it wasn't his image, it was the image of an actor who resembles him. Some people look alike, for better or worse. In any complaint resulting in a court case, it would seem to me that Konami and Kojima need only trot in the actor around which they built the character model and that should be it. Why it should even have to get that far, considering that Cavanero can't stop talking throughout the interview about how beneficial this whole coincidence has been, is beyond me.

from the grinds-my-metal-gears dept

Not so long ago, we wrote about Konami shutting down a fan-remake of the original Metal Gear, the much-beloved initial entry into the vaunted franchise. In that case, Konami did something of a flip-flop, with a company rep telling the development team initially that they had the go-ahead, only for the company's lawyers to pull the rug out from under the remake at the last moment. Well, flip-flopping seems to be becoming a thing when it comes to Metal Gear fan projects, now that the sequel to a previously released Metal Gear Solid fan-film has been nixed by the lawyers.

The original fan-film was called Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy, and Part 1 was released several years ago. It was generally regarded as mega-awesome. The indie team behind the project received no contact from anyone at Konami or from the Metal Gear Solid team until they met creator Hideo Kojima in person, who told the filmmakers how much he appreciated the film. The team began to work on Part 2. Then, apparently because they just couldn't freaking help themselves, the Konami brass shut the project down. You can hear from the director himself, in a "Farewell to Philanthropy" video put out.

It takes a better person than I for him to say these words.

"We knew this might've happened. And we have nothing against the creators of Metal Gear, the saga that we all love and will continue to love."

Good for Giacomo Talamini. He's much stronger with the jedi routine than I am, because I can assure you that if I were in his shoes I would be going full on dark-side. Mind-choking, sand-people killing, the whole bit. It's one thing to have Konami needlessly shut down a fan project instead of simply working out a zero-sum or cheap licensing arrangement, since the production of this film does absolutely nothing to harm the MGS franchise, and may indeed help spur it on further. But for the filmmakers to have received no negative feedback from Konami on their first film, and for the creator of the damned franchise to express his support, only to have the lawyers lose their lunch partway through the filming of the second film would be too much for me to bear.

from the konami-for-president dept

Eventually, video game companies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that their biggest fans can also be immensely creative and that they often want to channel that creativity towards adding to the game franchises they love. Thus far, the vast majority of fan-driven projects having anything to do with video game franchises are met with stonewall takedowns and cease and desist letters. The most frustrating of these are when mixed signals are sent to the fans engaged in these projects, where the people doing the work are under the impression that their efforts have been cleared for takeoff only to be grounded late in development. To treat creative folks who can be amongst a company's greatest fans that way is to bite the hand that feeds them in a very real way.

And now it's happened again. A group of dedicated Metal Gear fans endeavoring to remake the original 1987 NES title in Valve's Source engine and had been in contact with a Konami rep the entire time. After month's of work, Konami apparently just informed them that they no longer had permission and forced them to shut it all down.

"The project has been shut down by Konami," an email sent to the site read. "Seems that they all couldn't agree on the project going ahead."

The mod team also revealed that David Hayter was on board to voice Snake, and had even recorded some lines for it. It posted a work-in-progress trailer showing a rough cut of scenes yet to be animated, complete with Hayter's dialogue.

In correspondence elsewhere, remake organizer Ian Ratcliffe indicated that he had been in regular contact with a Konami representative in the UK about the project and that he'd been given the all clear, with the stipulation that the game not be sold commercially. The carpet was then pulled out from underneath the team by Konami's legal department in Japan. Ratcliffe was far more understanding than many people might have been.

The agreement was made verbally, we first got approval a couple of months back after being told to take the moddb page down. Following that Jay Boor from Konami UK, told me that the agreement was getting written up by Japans legal team. (We were contacted by a couple of guys from Japan initially but since it's all been through Jay.) We were told to keep the page down as they wanted to make the announcement once E3 was out of the way. I'm not really sure what happened to be honest, we had a lot of back and forth with Jay and he was in full support of the project. It seems that the whole of Konami was divided on whether we should go ahead or not but I think ultimately it was Japans decision.

I totally understand their reason in doing so, not matter how disheartened the team is, we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for all that they've done, Jay especially. Not to forget the huge amount of support we got from the fans, to which we're more than grateful for. We got to work alongside industry professionals, it's been really inspiring and I feel privileged to have been a part of it. We aren't gonna be sour about the whole thing it's the experience that counts.

We're now in the planning stages of making our own IP, in the words of Liquid Snake - "It's not over yet!"

It's an amazingly gracious and politic reaction to what was essentially the dicking over of the effort of a dedicated group of fans by Konami's legal team. To spend months working on a title, organizing labor, getting some impressive voice talent on board, all in good faith under the notion that a Konami rep had given the green light, and to then have all that work torn away by the very company whose work you love so much must be a hell of a feeling. Sure, Ratcliffe's team should have gotten the correspondence and the 'okay' in writing, but there's still no reason for Konami to dump on their fans like this. There was no commercial interest here, just the love of the game, so to speak. All in the name of copyright.

from the sue,-sue,-sue,-sue dept

As we keep waiting for a Supreme Court ruling in the Bilski case (any day now...), Glyn Moody points us to the news of a lawsuit that has been filed against 26 different software companies for violating an incredibly broad patent (5,832,511) on "Workgroup network manager for controlling the operation of workstations within the computer network" (say that 10 times fast). The list of companies sued is a who's who in software:

I'm sure none of those companies could have possibly come up with a system for controlling the operation of workstations within a computer network without this patent. At some point, isn't the fact that such a vast number of companies appear to have come up with the same basic thing independently a perfect prima facie case of obviousness?

from the losers-litigate dept

Just a few months ago guitar maker Gibson sued just about everyone for patent infringement over a patent it held on "virtual concerts." It looks like that lawsuit may have woken up others who happen to hold "virtual concert" patents. Video game maker Konami, which had some virtual concert games years ago, also happened to get some patents on the concept and have now sued Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band. Once again, this looks like a "losers litigate" strategy. Harmonix has created a hugely successful product in the space -- Konami has not. Yet, Konami wants a cut of Harmonix's profits. That's not the sort of incentives that should be encouraged.